The Realm of Blog

Native Interactivity and Animation for the Web HTML5 Canvas by Steve Fulton & Jeff Fulton Many of you probably know that I have been complaining and whining constantly about the new web standards  pushed so hard by the w3.org.   I am not a fan of 'applications' in websites that can be disrupted with right clicks and mouse highlights so easily like most of the work I have seen in HTML 5.  Of course there is always evolution that eventually wins me over.  Case example would be Onslaught! Arena , and I love the way they disable 'mouse highlight of elements'. What's that called?  And the disable right click!  How'd dey do dat?  Better yet, how did they even animate anything?   Well now I will finally get a chance to find out officially and learn from the ground up. For a while I have been following two brothers work, after accidentally stumbling into their site looking for (googling) 'Atari 8bit graphics' for inspiration.  What I found...

Graphics were pretty tough in the 8bit Atari days.  It took a lot of work to get things rolling, a lot of plot and drawTo and Player-Missile graphics.  That is until I discovered the method programmers were using to re-define character sets and create graphics using extra characters in the fontset.  The only way to do this effectively was to use a program that reordered the bytes for you, saved out that data and loaded it back in.  One such program that would load and save fonts was called Superfont. This program allowed the user to edit characters of the font in the checker board area and then save out the font to be loaded into a program later. These programs came from BBSs(dial-up online bulletin board systems, pre-internet) and in magazines like I have mentioned previously in my Gamasutra Blog, Compute!. Needless to say, I spent   mountain growing amounts of time making my own fonts and experimenting with fonts and creating my own.  Duri...